Abstract
Tuon and colleagues have developed an animal model to examine the impact of sepsis on memory in rats. They report important data that expand the understanding of the cognitive consequences of critical illness. Future research should follow this path of inquiry and extend animal models beyond aversive conditioning to include recently developed paradigms that will permit assessment of complex and cognitive processes, such as attention, episodic memory and orientation to time and place. This has the potential to greatly increase the putative understanding of the homologous neurocognitive dysfunctions acquired during critical illness.
Highlights
The methodology employed by Tuon and colleagues [1] has been used in behavioral neuroscience and comparative psychology since the inception of classical conditioning [2,3]
Jonathan Crystal at the University of Georgia has demonstrated that it is possible to test episodic memory in animals and attention and orientation to time and place [6,7]. Each of these abilities involves a component of memory, these cognitive faculties differ in important ways from aversive classical conditioning
Do these mnemonic processes rely on fundamentally different neurological substrates, but they are homologous to the memory and attentional deficits that are observed in survivors of critical illness
Summary
The methodology employed by Tuon and colleagues [1] has been used in behavioral neuroscience and comparative psychology since the inception of classical conditioning [2,3]. Major progress has been made over the past 20 years in the understanding of the cognitive consequences of critical illness. In order to expand the knowledge how disease states such as sepsis have a causal impact on the central nervous system and cognition, experimental animal models are certainly required.
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